Connect your Xbox360 to your Mac
It just keeps getting better. Now there's a compatible UPnP server for Mac OSX that is tailored for the Xbox360.
Note the screenshot of my Living Room TV to the right showing my three systems:
- The main Windows XP Pro system running Windows Media Connect
- The Windows Media Center PC
- Now, my (free) Mac Mini running Connect360
Sure it shows your Pictures from iPhoto and music from iTunes, I'd expect nothing less. But it also supports Shoutcast Streaming Radio via iTunes which is slick.
Now there's just no reason for a Mac household not to get an Xbox360. The company also has a number of other nice looking products for the PSP and iPod, including a Windows-based managment tool for PSP Media.
The only complain I have now with the Media blade on the Xbox360 is that it assumes that your family has only one machine. I realize that is the 80% 95% case, but the interface currently "associates" the XBox with a specific machine, so I have to go over to the System blade to desociate a remote PC and connect to the Mac. My wife will never go for this, so I'll just keep the main PC associated all the time and she'll never know there's other PCs. However, because of this little snafu I'd have to say that WAF is low for this interface in a multi-PC house.
I wonder if there's an "aggregating UPnP server/router" that would collect all three of these sources and present a single unified union of the available media.
Sigh, now I need to de-dupe my 6500 MP3s. The ID3 tags are out of control and I've got dupes all over. At least the MP3s from the CDs I had ripped by RipDigital are pristine. I freaking love those guys.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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hey do you think that with their move it intel technology, Mac's are gonna end with lower prices and larger market penetration, or is that counter to the entire mac ethos? I lay awake nights worrying over that one.
I'm running the Win32 version on Win2K3, its rock solid, incredibly low memory footprint (around 5Mb for 7K tracks). Its serving my 360, DMS-1 and Roku appliances like a champ.
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Isn't US household PC penetration around 60%, with less than a quarter of those having two or more PCs (so multi-PC penetration is less than 15%)? And then what fraction of those would have a decentralized setup where they want to treat 2 or more PCs as media servers? You know I use both Macs and PCs and have many of both, but I think this scenario is much less than 5%.